Beside Still Waters Ministries

Hehehe, when I decided to include J. S. Bach in my 2nd article about Martin Luther, I just couldn’t resist the musical pun for the title. Do you think you can Handel it, just this once? (groan) The Liszt goes on and on…

Okay, all levity aside, Bach is the epitome of the powerful musical legacy Martin Luther left in his reformation of the church. However, Luther wasn’t an unskilled composer of a few hymns that happened to turn out okay, but in fact he was a very able amateur musician that if he had not been so engrossed in theology and wanting the church to change he might have become a great composer. While they agreed on justification by faith, one of the main differences between Luther and the other leaders of the Reformation, Zwingli and Calvin, is that Luther had a great love and respect for music and believed that music was a vital part of Mass and the Christian life. He said in a letter to Ludwig Senfl that music is next to theology, and he felt that music and the word of God are closely related – most especially that the word of God is best expressed and taught through music (Westermeyer 144-146).

In Luther’s quest to bring the Gospel to the people where they were, through the Mass and the Bible being in the vernacular (the language of the people in whatever region they lived) and other such innovations, like writing hymns that would be easier for the average person to learn and sing, he tended to be fairly loose in his differentiation of the secular and the sacred. To him, the distinction between sacred and secular was not nearly as strong as it is for us, but at the same time he did distinguish what was appropriate for worship.

There are stories that he used bar songs and other “popular music” for the tunes to his hymn texts, but most musical scholars agree that while he did use a couple of folk melodies that were not used much at the time he did not use “popular music” in the church. He did, however, take some Gregorian chants, medieval hymns, and a few lesser-known folk melodies and reworked them in the same form as the German composers of the time – which was called “bar form”. God gave him a gift of uniting old and new, high art and folk art, and rural and urban styles with his chorales, so they appealed across all lines. He made it so church music was not just for the professional musicians and out of touch with the common person because they had been written hundreds of years earlier, but made them in the contemporary style of the day in their own language so that the songs met people right were they were at in their day-to-day living and they “stuck in their head” with people singing them throughout their daily work. Secondary only to the invention of the printing press, his music helped Luther’s message spread quickly and widely throughout Europe, so that instead of a local heresy that would have been quickly squashed by the Roman Catholic church it became an event that changed the course of Western history forever.

About 200 years later, a Lutheran organist brought Martin Luther’s chorales to a whole new musical level and has helped them even more endure through the ages as the one of the most beautiful artistic expressions of love for God imaginable. This organist was Johann Sebastian Bach. “More than anyone else, J.S. Bach symbolizes music that grows out of, yet moves beyond worship” (Westermeyer 240). His contribution not only to Sacred/Christian music, but also to Classical music as a whole is phenomenal. In spite of how complex his music is, it grew out of and affirmed the congregation’s song – the preludes and fugues were meant to be an instrumental introduction to the congregational singing of a chorale (in our language today, a hymn).

The best thing about Bach is that his music was not about simply writing music for the beauty of music itself, it was his attempt to express the beauty of the Gospel of Christ and his love for His Savior. Because he did not want to claim glory for himself from his music, when he signed his manuscripts, he also wrote something which you might recognize from my following in Bach’s footsteps, “Soli Deo Gloria” which is Latin for “To God Only be Glory.”

That I may one day be able to use the gifts God has given me to create something a fraction as meaningful for the Kingdom as anything Luther and Bach ever did.

Soli Deo Gloria.

Westermeyer, Paul. Te Deum: The Church And Music. Fortress Press, Minneapolis, MN, 1998.